The use of declarative and procedural knowledge in intelligent navigation displays

Abstract

One theory of environmental cognition suggests that both declarative landmark knowledge and procedural route knowledge are essential in structuring internal representations of the environment; such representations facilitate effective navigation in that environment [5, 7]. The proposed study will provide data to test this theory. The application that will be studied is an Advanced Traveler Information System (ATIS), which provides route guidance information to automobile drivers. Current route guidance systems incorporate only procedural route information in their route guidance displays (i. e., they give directions for getting to your destination without supplying landmarks to identify the route [e.g., 3]). This study will evaluate how the inclusion of landmark icons in ATIS displays affects users' navigation performance. The results will be important to ATIS developers, who need to know what informational elements to include in ATIS route guidance displays to most effectively support navigation tasks. The results will also be important in a theoretical sense, by testing a theory of environmental cognition with real-world navigation tasks.